Who Got Filthy Rich From Snap IPO: a High School, Millennials

A banner for Snap Inc. hangs from the front of the New York Stock Exchange, Thursday, March 2, 2017, in New York. The company behind the popular messaging app Snapchat is expected to start trading Thursday... (Mark Lennihan)

(Newser)
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A California high school has made millions of dollars from the initial public offering of shares in Snap Inc., the company behind Snapchat. The board of Saint Francis High School in Mountain View agreed to invest $15,000 in seed money in Snap in 2012, when the company was just getting started, the AP reports. It had been invited to do so by one of the student's parents, a venture capital investor, high school president Simon Chiu says in a letter issued to the school community Thursday. The school held onto the investment until this week, when Snap shares sold for $17 each in an IPO. The share price rocketed another 44% higher when trading began Thursday. The school was quoted by media as saying it sold two-thirds of its shares to raise $24 million.

"The school's investment in Snap—which this morning announced the completion of its IPO—has matured and given us a significant boost," says Chiu in the letter. Also capitalizing on the Snap IPO: investors and employees of the company, including its millennial CEO and CTO. USA Today reports Snap chief Evan Spiegel, 26, and 28-year-old Bobby Murphy, the company's head of technology, each dumped 16 million shares, meaning they each pocketed $272 million. That's not counting the 210 million shares both Spiegel and Murphy still hold—worth just over $5 billion each. And Siegel is also set to receive a special "CEO Award" for bringing Snap to IPO status, meaning he'll get another 36.8 million shares over the next three years, bringing his total overall take to $6 billion or so, CNN reports. (Read more Snapchat stories.)

You have to read between the lines a bit. This isn't a typical high school: it's a $16,000 a year California private school for socioeconomic elites. Most schools will never be in a position to emulate their success, nor will they have venture capitalists at their PTA meetings to show them how.

Ezekiel 25:17

Mar 3, 2017 11:52 AM CST

The bad of it is a lot of kids that age think its the rule instead of the exception. Take my nephew who is in that boat. He's 24 years old, has never had a job, and has $33000 in college debts and has not graduated. When people ask why he didn't get a job to help keep from taking all that debt he replies, "I'm going to graduate and get a good enough job to pay it off in just a year or two." I was glad to get two degrees with zero debt. But I achieved that by working up to 4 simultaneous jobs, something that is totally foreign to a millennial.